Cooking year-round on a wood cookstove: the dream, the reality, and the practicalities of relying on our own firewood and being off the gas grid

The dream and the reality of living with a wood cookstove or slow combustion stove

For many years I dreamed of a life with a wood-fired cooking stove slowly humming in the background, ready at all hours to make a cup of tea.

Relying on our own firewood has made the reality of wood-fired cooking a bit different, but it is just as lovely, in its own way.

Most off-grid people I’ve met here in Tasmania don’t use their combustion stoves all year, but rely on gas stoves in the warm months and whenever they want to quickly boil water or heat something up.

For a while, we had a single camping gas burner that relied on small cans of butane, but bringing in gas at all when we live on many acres of forest, and when we are working towards independence in all aspects of life did not sit well with me, so I worked on ways to live without the gas stove, and now it has been a couple of years since we have used it. We now have a “Kelly Kettle” for the quick boiling of water, and this uses twigs.

The reality of working towards energy independence is similar to working towards food independence, education independence, or any kind of independence: it is not effortless and it requires some forward planning. We use a small amount of petrol to power our chainsaw, so it is not entirely independent either, but the amount of time the chainsaw saves makes it worthwhile for now (with a bowsaw for backup just in case). Electric chainsaws are an option for some people, but not possible for us at this point in time.

Working with homegrown firewood

Firewood is not all conveniently located right next to the house – it needs to be brought from where the trees are growing, so the way that you will do this determines how much time wood chores will take.

Some homesteaders might take a seasonal approach: putting in a lot of work towards firewood through the winter, and not much during the growing season. My husband is in charge of the firewood and does firewood chores all through the year. Generally once or twice a week he cuts trees that were felled a while ago into stove-length pieces, and every day we bring some of this wood to near the house.

We have two pallets near the house. One pallet gets filled while the other gets used. This helps to dry the wood out just a little bit more, in case it has been sitting on the damp forest floor. At this stage we have a tarp over the top of the pallets, but eventually we might put up a proper roof.

Some of the wood gets split into smaller pieces to use as starter wood, and larger logs get split, but most smaller logs are not split and go into the stove as-is.

Firewood needs time to dry out, so trees for next year’s firewood need to be felled this year, and there needs to be enough of it cut and dried, with a bit of a surplus in case the chainsaw breaks down or there is some other delay along the way. Generally, he can fell a tree (or it can fall down on its own), and leave it whole out in the weather while it dries out, but once it’s cut into smaller pieces, we want to either stack it or get it to the pallets if the weather is damp, because the moisture from the earth can get into the wood.

In A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen, and in a guest post on Practical Self Reliance I shared my thoughts on cooking on a wood cookstove, and on cooking with wet wood… If you’re trying to use wet firewood to bake good bread, cook beautifully browned roast meat, and sear steaks, then you’re in for a disappointment. To get the most out of a wood cookstove, you’ll need to figure out a wood gathering and storage system that works for you and gets wood dry enough to cook with.

Different kinds of wood will take different lengths of time to dry out. Wood also dries out more quickly in summer and in dry windy weather than in damp weather.

Minimising firewood use

To begin with, we don’t usually have hot drinks in the morning, and if we do, the Kelly Kettle can do this using a few twigs, rather than firing up the woodstove early. Living this way took a while to adjust to, and coffee addicts reading this might be shaking their heads, but we are used to it now, and it w

Breakfasts are cold food – bread with gjetost or butter, yoghurt with crispy buckwheat, almonds, and honey, or oat slice or other stuff baked the night before. By having a cold breakfast, we don’t need to light the fire until it’s time to cook lunch, which is our main meal of the day. If we wanted eggs for breakfast, they could be cooked the night before, either hard cooked, or baked into a frittata.

I’d like to say that when the fire is going, I always make the most of it. But sometimes I find it too overwhelming and I need to have a break every now and then (or need to do other tasks around the place) rather than cooking lunch while making jam while making cheese while preserving food while baking bread and a bunch of other stuff all at once.

When we are really trying to economise on wood use, I try to do as much stuff as possible while the fire is already hot, rather than continuing to feed it.

When I’m not actively using the stove, I close the air intake as much as possible. This works best when there are well-established logs on the fire: if I did this when logs were still catching then they might smother and I may have to re-light it. Sometimes if I’ve left it for too long, I’ll need a small amount of starter wood to get it going again, but starter wood is also homegrown, and it usually gets going again very quickly, so it is not a problem. The less moisture in the wood, the better it will go when the air intake is shut down – wood that’s a bit wet needs more airflow.

Cooking with a wood cookstove in summer

Cooking with a properly-designed wood cookstove is not the same as having a large firebox wood heating stove blasting out heat. In the cooking stove, the heat is mostly directed to the oven and the hotplates – this is what it is designed to do. Some Australian stoves, such as some of the Thermalux and Everhot ones have a lot of insulation and are designed to give as little heat into the room as possible, to be used through an Australian summer

We are in a climate that needs heat more than cooling, and rely on our cooking stove for winter heat, so when it was time to replace our first woodstove, I chose one that would provide some extra heat. I am finding in summer that the new Homewood stove heats up the home slightly more than our old Rayburn Royal did, but this can be managed.

In summer here, I open lots of windows and try to minimise the time that the fire is going.

Summer cooking off the grid without a wood burning cookstove

Readers in hotter climates may need to have different strategies to mine. Having outdoor kitchens for the summer used to be a common solution in climates with hot summers, and even today, many homes have outdoor barbecues that can be used for a lot of the summer cooking.

For anyone serious about relying on homegrown wood fuel year-round in a climate with hot summers, setting up wood-fired cooking gear outdoors can be a good option. Rocket ovens and rocket stove technology make really efficient use of twigs and other small prunings. Solar cookers can be a good fuel-free option if you have lots of sun.

For those who have enough solar power and don’t mind using electric gadgets, slow cookers and the smaller models of instant pots used on sunny days can use minimal amounts of home-produced solar electricity and can be a good solution for indoor cooking without heating the house up – just find out first how many watts they use at once, as not all inverters and solar setups will handle the amount of watts that some of the larger instant pots use. For people with larger inverters than our 1200 watt one, a portable induction hotplate could possibly work too.

Energy independence

It is a beautiful thing being able to harvest our own firewood and cook our food with it. Electrical systems have all kinds of things that can break or go wrong, whereas the technology of wood fired cooking is simple and beautiful, and after nine years of living with the reality of wood-fired cooking, I still find it romantic and lovely.